The PLOTUS Eaters.

There's a new Poet Laureate, and it's Kay Ryan. Now if we can just manage to avoid electing John McCain come November, I think the United States can get itself back on the right track.

Honestly, this is really excellent news. While almost anyone would have been an improvement over Charles Simic, the appointment of Ryan is going to take the post in an entirely new direction, regardless of whether Ron Silliman thinks she's a "Poet of Quietude" or not. Seeing new poems of hers in Poetry is basically the only reason I bother to buy that publication any longer, and I can't imagine why The New Yorker's poetry editor chooses to print her work so often seeing that it runs directly counter to the magazine's apparent goal of killing its readers with boredom or American poetry with inanity. But I'm at least 80% sure I didn't start a blog to be mean to people I don't have to see in real life (check the previous entry, there are still some kinks I'm working out.) Anyway, Kay Ryan can do more with four four-word lines than Simic can with twenty - I'm in perpetual admiration of her economy, intelligence, and perceptiveness.

There are a lot of writers out there, however, who are dissatisfied with the decision because they don't feel Ryan is experimental enough, and Silliman spends some time dissecting the media's designation of her as "outsider" on his blog. As someone who really does operate on the fringe, I guess it's his prerogative to take issue. But could we be more mature about this, please? The problem with the School of Quietude/Post-Avant dichotomy isn't just that it's a crude and meaningless apparatus for understanding contemporary American poetry, or that it falls apart entirely when applied to individual poets. It's that it turns contemporary poetics into a battlefield instead of a discussion, a place where you have to pick sides, where there's a right answer and a wrong one. Nerds and jocks. I think Silliman writes very well, and he definitely maintains one of the best poetry sites in the blogosphere. But give me a break:

This places Ryan into an interesting situation. Expectations could hardly be lowered any further. The task before her is not simply to find new and useful ways to promote the diversity of American poetries, but to rehabilitate the office of PLOTUS itself. She can begin by presuming that she represents all of the poets & poetries of the nation, not just the same little clique that’s clung to the job since 1937.

Seriously, this is starting to sound way too much like high school. Anyone willing to claim that Robert Penn Warren and Gwendolyn Brooks belong to the "same little clique" obviously hasn't looked farther than the shallowest formal resemblances, but it's just easier to make a blanket statement about the entire 71-year-old position because Penn Warren taught Robert Lowell who was friends with Elizabeth Bishop and they all knew Cleanth Brooks! It's a peculiar trait of experimental poets, that they guard their fringe status ferociously but seem relentlessly preoccupied with the mainstream. Like how Rayanne and Angela would get into those enormous fights almost every episode of "My So-Called Life" but would always work it out because, secretly, they wanted to be each other? I'm not suggesting a poetry beyond schools. But maybe I am? I just think it's dumb not to admit that you'd like to have Angela Chase's nice family or be adventurous and devastating like her best friend. That's how poetry evolves and things get better. When you don't do that, there's no way you can grow, and there's a character in the show for you too: his name was Brian Krakow.